‘Pehelwanji’ brings a warm glow!

My colleagues in Delhi Manisha and Mukesh recently got our book, ‘Pehelwanji’ converted into a Digitally Accessible Information System (DAISY) file in English and Hindi with the help of Saksham Trust. I got it done in Kannada in Bangalore.

Our Marketing Head Sampurna presented the book at a convention in Kolkota, and will surely fill us in on what happened there.
Meanwhile, I just wanted to share the warm glow bestowed on me when I was at Mitra Jyothi last week. When I told Madhu Singhal that I was in her not-for-profit organisation to get one of our books recorded so that it could be ‘read’ by visually-impaired children, she was all praise. “What a wonderful thing you’re doing! Lovely!”

Madhu, for those who don’t know, started Mitra Jyothi in 1990. She is totally blind, has a master’s degree in Hindustani music, is a voracious reader, has an amazing memory, and has over 4000 talking books in the Mitra Jyothi library.

In the DAISY conversion work, my first stop was an address in Koramangala, Enable India. I missed seeing the big-enough building that houses this NGO, but a semi-literate visually-impaired person down the road directed us to the place.

Pushpa, a receptionist at Enable India, has no sight in one eye, and reduced vision in the other. She expertly directed the auto in which we traveled from Enable India to Mitra Jyothi. Just one-and-a-half months into the job, Nandini, the young library assistant, expertly helped us with the recording and sound editing.
Shanti Raghavan, who started Enable India, introduced me to Ganesh Prasad, the DAISY representative in Bangalore, and working full time at Enable India. He took time off to help us with ‘Pehelwanji’.

Shivakumar, a technical wizard, associated with Enable India, worked on the conversion twice. He sent me the DAISY file, for the second time, at 10.30 pm …because he knew we needed it for a presentation.
And I got all the praise from Madhu while all I had done was get a lot of people to do a lot of work!

Can you See just how beautiful this world is!

And oh, I forgot, when I requested my neighbour Shobha if she could be the Kannada voice, her father-in-law encouraged her to go ahead, while he took care of the house.

That warm glow I spoke of in the beginning? Now I hope you feel it too… To check out the pilot version (meaning, it could have several glitches!) of ‘Pehelwanji’ in Kannada, please follow the directions below. Download the file: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/132469/Final.zip Download the software from here: http://daisy.org/projects/amis/

Direct link: http://daisy.org/projects/amis/Setup-amis30-U.S.English.zip

Unzip the first file. Run it in the software. Please give feedback!